‘That woman,’ she mutters. ‘She will not leave me alone. She can’t, even for one night, stop bothering me about the new book. Not for one night! I mean, I know it’s a bit past the deadline, but that was a soft deadline, surely. It’s not as if I’m not working on it.’ She looks up at Philip. ‘I am, aren’t I, Philip? Tell Emma I’m trying my best.’
He looks at me with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Wanda,’ he says very seriously, ‘is really trying.’
‘Ha!’ she crows. ‘See? I’m trying. One can but try. Oh, you must excuse me — that child over there is apparently the new book girl for the Women’s Weekly and I have to befriend her.’ She shoots off through the crowd like a tipped-over firecracker.
‘Wanda is trying, is she?’ I say to Philip.
‘Extremely trying.’
I laugh. ‘She always has been. But I’m sure she’ll pull the book together. She always does.’
I’m about to tell him about all the times in the past Wanda has run late and fed us ludicrous excuses, when my phone buzzes in my pocket. Pulling it out, I see Charlotte’s number on the screen. It’s twenty past eight, which means she’s been trying to get the girls to go to bed since I left and now she will have reached the end of her tether.
Unlike Wanda, Charlotte is not a trier. She gives about thirty per cent effort, at best.
‘Excuse me,’ I say to Philip, ‘I have to take this. It’s my incompetent babysitter.’
I answer. ‘Hello, Charlotte, what’s up?’
In the background I can hear crying. Not injured or genuinely sad crying, more the sound of two small girls who are taking immense pleasure in pissing off a fifteen-year-old who wants to be paid for sitting on the sofa, watching TV, texting her mates and eating my chocolate.
‘Emma, I’m really sorry, but I might need you to come back. I think Freya and Lola might be coming down with something.’
Yeah, I think. They’re coming down with great vengeance and furious anger, on you. I expect they’re also coming down from the jelly snakes she will have fed them as soon as I left, since her childcare skills are entirely glucose-based.
‘What makes you think they’re coming down with something?’
‘I don’t know. Freya’s gone light red in the face and she’s quite sweaty. I think she must have a fever.’
‘Charlotte, is she by any chance wearing two layers of polyester tiger suit?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe?’
Philip guffaws. I look at him and roll my eyes.
‘Can you check? If she’s wearing two, she’s going to burst into flames. Take one off, at least.’
I do a quick calculation. I can stay here for another hour or so, during which time the girls will continue to torment Charlotte. They won’t go to sleep until at least ten, which means they’ll be horrible tomorrow. If I jump in a cab now, I can be home in twenty minutes and have them asleep ten minutes after that, since I can tell from the pitch of their shrieking that they are moving from having-fun-screaming-at-the-babysitter to genuinely overtired misery. Either way, I can tell Charlotte has no hope of getting them to bed.
‘Is Tim in bed?’ I ask.
‘Yep, I think he’s asleep.’
‘And you really can’t get the girls to bed?’
‘Nup. They’re going a bit mental. They reckon they need you.’
I sigh. ‘Fine. I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Try reading them a book or something. Just to calm them down a bit. And stick Freya in front of a fan.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Charlotte says, sounding terribly bored by it all. ‘See you soon.’
I end the call. I take a deep breath in and let it out slowly. I love Lola, but she and Freya can wind each other up like you wouldn’t believe. If I hadn’t let Helen and Troy dump her with me tonight, Freya would have gone to bed as soon as I left. This was a grave miscalculation on my part.
Philip’s still standing there, politely looking around.
‘Everything okay?’ he asks. ‘Tiger trouble?’
‘You could say that. Do you have kids?’
‘No, but we did have a tiger for a while when I was small. I know a bit more about them than I do about kids.’
‘You had a real tiger?’
‘Only for a few months. My parents bought it from the pet shop at Harrods, back when such things were legal. After a little while it became obvious that it was a very bad idea. But you must go — don’t let me distract you with tiger tales.’
‘I love tiger tales. But I am going to have to head off.’
‘Here, did you get a goody bag? They were handing them out earlier.’ He passes me a tote bag emblazoned with the cover of After the Fact.
I glance inside. There’s a copy of the book, a miniature bottle of vodka, a box of chocolates, a red lipstick and a pair of pink fluffy handcuffs. And a voucher for a family visit to the Police Museum. I’ve never understood how the marketing department of this company thinks.
‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘Is there another one you can grab?’
‘I think I’ll be fine without one. I prefer to buy my own red lipstick.’
‘Well, it was nice to meet you, Phillip.’
While I’m trying to figure out if shaking hands is the right thing to do here, he hugs me quickly and kisses me on both cheeks. ‘Good to meet you too. I’ll see you at the next one of these, with any luck.’
‘Can you please encourage Wanda to make that sooner rather than later?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ he says. ‘Now, go fire that babysitter.’
* * *
I don’t fire Charlotte. I don’t know how. But I do make it very clear, as I’m paying her, while Freya and Lola leap off the sofa onto the pile they’ve made of all the pillows and blankets from my bed, that I’m less than impressed with her performance tonight. She doesn’t care.
I bundle the girls off to bed, which they do willingly because they have got some sense after all and they can tell I’m not to be trifled with at this point, then I go straight to bed too. It’s still early enough that I think I can manage two episodes of The Devil’s Heirs before I fall asleep.
Tilde still hasn’t figured out who is killing the single middle-aged women, and now her boss is concerned she is being distracted from her job by her troublesome ex-boyfriend. I have to say, I’m with the boss on this one. Tilde needs to get her head in the game or she’s going to find herself back in uniform and the murderous rampage will continue. It strikes me that her boss looks a lot like Wanda’s friend, Philip. I think of his description of himself as an emotional support animal and it makes me laugh again. I could use an emotional support animal. So could Tilde, I suspect.
Chapter Three
Two days later, I’m walking three children to school. Term two has only just started but already it’s been chilly in the mornings. Freya’s switched from her light summer tiger suit to the fleecy version, and we walk hand in paw. Tim and Lola dawdle behind us, because Lola is insisting on carrying Tim’s huge backpack.
We’re a good little unit, just the four of us. Lola seems happy enough when she’s with her parents, but something’s different about her — she’s easier and more outgoing when she is with her brother and sister.
‘I’ll carry it, Tim,’ she says. ‘I’m the sherpa.’
‘Okay, Sherpa Lola,’ I tell her, ‘if you can let Tim carry one handle, we’ll make it to the summit before the bell goes. How does that sound?’
‘No, Memma. Sherpas do all the carrying. Tim’s a climber.’
Since she learned to speak Lola has called me Memma. It’s a mixture of Mummy and Emma, and I like it. I don’t know how Helen can stand it. If Tim and Freya ever called her anything even approaching Mum or Mumma, it would destroy me. Helen seems to rise above that sort of thing.
The little sherpa struggles on, up the slight incline of the street the school is on. It’s slow going. Tim climbs onto the low front wall of the nearest house and walks carefully along it. He ducks under a low-hanging frangipani bra
nch, and I instinctively move closer in case he overbalances, reaching out to hold his forearm. It’s got goosebumps on it.
‘Tim, want to put on your jumper?’
He looks at me like I am an oracle. He often reacts like that. As if common sense is some astonishing breakthrough.
‘Yes!’ He leaps off the wall and darts back to the sherpa. Obligingly, she puts down the bag and Tim rifles through it. A lunchbox, a water bottle and a plastic bag containing various-sized lumps of sandstone tumble onto the nature strip, but no jumper. He looks up at me.
‘I haven’t got it,’ he says, crestfallen.
It’s not the first time this has happened. It’s not the tenth time this has happened.
I begin the routine interrogation.
‘Did it come home with you yesterday?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you remember taking it off at school?’
‘Maybe? Yes. Yes! I do. I got hot playing handball, so I took it off then.’
‘Where did you put it?’
‘On the ground, probably.’
I don’t shout at him. I’m proud of that. I’m getting good at this. We are five terms into his school career, and so far Tim has lost, permanently, six hats, four jumpers, one entire schoolbag. I’ve given up counting the drink bottles and lunchbox lids.
Tim resembles a kid who has his act together. His hair is quite tidy and he keeps his clothes reasonably clean, for a six-year-old. He just doesn’t have any sense of ownership.
Discarding possessions in his wake, Tim just drifts along happily through life. My dad calls him deciduous, and Laura’s take on it is that he keeps losing things because he feels he has lost his father. He feels untethered, so he sets his things adrift in the world. Laura’s favourite game is what I call ‘Everything Is Troy’s Fault’ and, much as I appreciate the sentiment, it can get a little wearing.
I take a deep breath and let it out quite loudly. Laura has pulled me up on this many times — she calls it sighing and maintains it is very passive aggressive. I call it practising mindfulness, and a better option than shouting at my kid in the street over a missing jumper. It’s probably a form of lung yoga.
Tim loses things because he is a little boy with more important things to think about than stuff. I love that about him. It’s why I don’t punish him when he consistently comes home without his hat or his schoolbag or, on one memorable and inexplicable occasion, both of his shoelaces. He was as surprised as I was when I pointed it out to him.
And now we have to pick up the pace if we are going to make it to school in time to go to the Lost Property room to find this jumper.
As we approach the school I start seeing more parents — on foot, on adult scooters, and pulling up to unload their offspring from massive shiny cars. I’ve been walking this route every morning now for more than a year, but I still don’t know most of them more than just to say hello.
The mothers in particular all seem to know each other. They call out about swapping pickups from football practice, and as they tie their dogs to the fence and hand their kids their saxophone cases and backpacks, their glossy blonde heads bob and glisten in the sunlight.
That’s an exaggeration. They’re not all blonde. But they are all beautifully groomed, clad in tidy ankle-length jeans and pristine white sneakers or leather boots. They’re lean, Pilates-lean, like Helen.
I don’t know how they pull it off. I could understand it if they were all housewives with nothing to do but clean the house, get their hair done and tone their muscles for six hours a day, but these women, I’ve learned, were once lawyers and accountants, traders and university professors, and now they are reinvented versions of themselves. Now they are entrepreneurs, corporate coaches, and consultants in their fields of expertise.
In the last three years, while I was leaning over with my head between my knees, waiting for my world to stop spinning around me in quite such a sick-making way, these women were all leaning in. They’re the Robocop version of women who have it all. They’ve been through the fire of early motherhood and have come out the other side like a bunch of very lightly botoxed phoenixes.
I, on the other hand, seem to have come out singed and suffering from smoke inhalation. I have no idea what to say to them, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
I’m unsure how much people around here know about our situation. I’ve certainly never gone into details with these women, but word gets around in a suburb like Shorewood. It’s a tightknit community, its fabric intricately woven from gossip. Without even having many local friends I know all sorts of things about the people who live around here, so I can only assume they know the same about me.
I did try a bit to make friends with the other parents in Tim’s class last year, when he started school. But one morning a woman I was standing with outside the assembly hall started talking about how she’d heard about a kindy mum who had been left by her husband for a Pilates instructor and now she was raising their baby. I was too mortified to say anything, so I pretended I needed to change Lola’s nappy and left.
That was pretty hard to come back from, so now I avoid the school parents as much as possible. Laura tells me I should just own the story, and tell everyone. She reckons people will be on my side. But I don’t know. Maybe straight after he left that would have worked. But now I’m pretty sure I just seem like a nutjob.
Lost Property is open every morning, but only for ten minutes. The rest of the school buildings have been open for forty-five minutes when Deb, the office manager, turns up at 9.05 am every weekday to unlock the padlock on the door of a small room under the staircase. She returns at 9.15 am, five minutes after the bell, to secure the room again.
The pointless and arbitrary nature of this set-up makes less than no sense. It means you have five minutes to search with your child, then another five minutes on your own to find whatever they’ve lost. If you do happen to be smiled on by the gods and recover your lost property in the second five minutes, you can’t just hand it to your kid, because they’ve gone to class. You have to lurk around outside the classroom trying to get their attention, which is embarrassing for everyone.
Is this set-up in case people wander in off the street to help themselves to mismatched Tupperware boxes and lids, and drink bottles teeming with weeks-old bacteria-infested water? Is it to stop looting? What are the parents who have proper jobs to go to meant to do about lost property? Buy more jumpers, I suppose.
At least Deb is always on time. At exactly 9.05 am she lifts the hinged section of the office countertop and marches along the worn green carpet to where Tim, Freya, Lola and I are lined up at the Lost Property door, like we’re waiting to buy tickets for the world’s most disappointing concert.
Deb carries the keys to the school on a short leather strap that she clips each day to the belt of whichever lurid floral frock suits her mood.
We are well known to Deb.
‘Good morning, intrepid explorers!’ she trills. It is one of the joys of Deb’s life to liken the Lost Property room to an undiscovered treasure trove. Last time it was Tutankhamun’s tomb. The time before that it was Angkor Wat.
‘What will we find in El Dorado today, Tim, my gallant knight?’ she asks.
Tim looks at his feet. ‘Jumper, I hope.’
‘Right then,’ she says as she unclips the bunch of keys and holds them up, squinting at each in turn. ‘Aha! Ride, boldly ride, if you seek for El Dorado!’
With a flourish, Deb flings open the door.
‘Thanks,’ Tim mumbles.
‘Remember, in ten minutes the jungle will once again close over the mysterious city of gold, leaving no trace,’ she calls over her shoulder, striding back to the office.
The Lost Property room is no El Dorado. If a tomb raider chanced upon it they would shudder and brick up the doorway. Windowless and poky, its walls are lined with shelves on which stand forgotten drink bottles in rows like the motley recruits of the French Foreign Legion, amid stacks of
scarred, faded plastic lunchboxes. Despite a policy of emptying out lost food containers before they are incarcerated here, the remembrance of bananas and sandwich-crusts past lingers in the air.
The clock is ticking. We have just under five minutes until the bell.
‘Girls, sit on the floor right there,’ I tell them, ‘and guard Tim’s bag.’ There’s no point letting that get sucked into the debris. ‘Tim, start with that tub: it looks jumper-ish.’
With no discernible urgency, Tim starts plucking pieces of clothing from the tub and holding them up as if they are radioactive. I don’t blame him. Everything in here is just kind of gross. Even things that have only been here overnight have acquired a sort of jailhouse stink.
Even if an almost-brand-new jumper comes out, and they often do — it’s not the Bermuda Triangle — it is tainted and never feels quite nice again, even if you soak it and wash it and hang it out in the sunshine.
But I’ll be damned if I’m paying twenty-eight dollars for yet another jumper.
Tim isn’t even looking. ‘Come on,’ I tell him sternly. ‘It’s your jumper, mate. You need to look for it properly.’
I start tossing jumpers over my shoulder so Tim can check their nametags. After six throws I hear a muffled giggle and turn to see him standing motionless, with jumpers caught on his arms and head. He hasn’t checked any of them.
Suddenly a man sticks his head around the door. He looks at me, at Tim and the girls, then abruptly disappears.
‘Bon,’ he calls. ‘It’s pretty busy in here. Go play and I’ll bring it out when I find it.’
Ha, I think. When you find it. He must be new here. And did he just call his kid Bon?
The man comes all the way into the room now, and stands with his feet either side of a tub of hats. Two things strike me with a jolt. Firstly, he is very handsome. And secondly, I knew him, once upon a time.
His name is Adam Cunningham. Ten years ago he wrote a book about his backpacking adventures in Europe, and how he ended up living in Amsterdam. It was called Far Canal. I was his editor.
How to Be Second Best Page 4